On Monday evening in the O’Laughlin Auditorium, award-winning actress and stage director Phylicia Rashad visited Saint Mary’s as part of the College’s Margaret Hill Visiting Artist series. In addition to participating in a Q&A session led by the department chair for theatre, professor Mark Abram-Copenhaver, Rashad led a theater master class for Saint Mary’s students and met privately with various students and faculty throughout the day.
Rashad has been nominated and won various Tony, Primetime Emmy, NAACP Image and People’s Choice awards for her acting on Broadway, television and film. She is most known for her theatrical performances in “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Gem in the Ocean” and her role as Clair Huxtable in “The Cosby Show.”
Most recently, Rashad served as a dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University for three years. In an interview with The Observer and the South Bend Tribune, Rashad reflected on her time spent at Howard as a student and dean as a time of great accomplishment and growth.
“Howard University was conceived by people who were not African American with the intention to create a new society in America that was inclusive; I love that,” Rashad said. “The true gift of Howard University, it’s a feeling that you carry with you, knowing that you’re a part of that legacy and that intention lives within you.”
Rashad began her acting career as an understudy for the 1983 Broadway production of “The Wiz,” which is where she found community as a young performer.
“They were serious dancers, and I was in their company,” she said. “It was inspiring. Those challenges, you better be ready, you know, because things happen and you might have to step in.”
Throughout her presentation, titled “An Evening with Phylicia Rashad,” Abram-Copenhaver and Rashad discussed her experiences and growth on Broadway and on film over the past four decades.
“Theater takes time. It does. It’s one thing to learn lines and to be trained technically in a way so that you could say a thing in a certain way and somebody will understand what it is that you’re saying. That’s one thing” she said. “But to actually embody another human being’s thoughts, to understand what those motivations are and to engage like that eight times a week, each time as if it were the first. It takes time to move into that and there’s so much joy in it for me.”
Rashad also took the time to reflect on her time working on “The Cosby Show,” noting her favorite memories from the set were working with acting “giants” such as Danny Kaye, Lena Horne, Sônia Braga and Christopher Plummer.
“I couldn’t wait to get to work every day. It was the greatest work environment to be in, that I had been in at that time,” Rashad told The Observer. “I didn’t think so much about the full impact that it was having culturally, not only here but around the world.”
Rashad mentioned her Broadway directing debut will commence in the spring of 2025 with the direction of the play “Purpose,” written by Tony Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. While working on the play, Rashad told the audience and Copenhaver it’s been a project she enjoys coming back to work on.
“You hear things, you know, for the first time, even after you’ve worked on a play for months, you’ve gone away from it, you’ve gone into some other work. You come back to it, and then you hear things … and you begin to make connections … connecting that for the actors so that they can carry it,” Rashad said.
Rashad cited one of the most significant moments during her acting career was her realization of her purpose while acting as an understudy for four separate roles in the 1971 production of “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.”
“It’s not about how clever you are, about how cute you are, or about how big your voice can be, or how many characters (you play),” she said. “It’s about offering what you do to people and that’s when it becomes service. And that’s when it takes on a totally different color, all the lights go on and there’s this fountain of creativity that just won’t stop because you’ve connected to something very real inside yourself.”
For the final question of the night, Copenhaver asked Rashad for any advice for the young women at Saint Mary’s who want to make a life in the arts.
“Do it,” Rashad said, as the packed auditorium erupted in applause.
